2008 Intel Science Talent Search
Winners

First Place: $100,000 scholarship, Shivani Sud, 17, of
Durham, North Carolina for a bioinformatics and genomics project that
focused on identifying stage II colon cancer patients at high risk for
recurrence and the best therapeutic agents for treating their tumors.

Second Place: $75,000 scholarship, Graham William
Wakefield Van Schaik, 17, of Columbia, South Carolina, for a two-year
study of the long-term effects of exposure to pyrethroids, commonly found
in household and agricultural pesticides.

Third Place: $50,000 scholarship, Brian Davis
McCarthy, 18, of Hillsboro, Oregon, for his research on developing new
types of solar cells. Brian synthesized extremely thin and fragile films
and verified his results using scanning electron microscopy
techniques.

Fourth Place: $25,000 scholarship, Katherine Rose
Banks, 17, of Brooklyn, New York, for a project on problems in
combinatorial geometry. Katie gave a proof of a conjecture of S.
Rabinowitz, that a convex lattice polygon with nine vertices cannot have
exactly eight or nine interior lattice points.

Fifth Place: $25,000 scholarship, Eric Nelson Delgado,
18, of Bayonne, New Jersey, for studying the use of novel efflux pump
inhibitors (EPI) to improve the efficacy of antibiotics against multidrug
resistant bacteria.

Sixth Place: $25,000 scholarship, David Alex
Rosengarten, 18, of Great Neck, New York, for a physics project in which
he studied dark matter and the controversial galactic rotational curves.
David's results showed that Einstein's General Relativity Theory, in
principle, could modify rotation curves without including dark matter.

Seventh Place: $20,000 scholarship, Xiaomeng Zeng, 18,
of Iowa City, Iowa used Iowa public library statistics and U.S. census
datasets to study the long-standing debate of whether public library
funding from either government or private sources might adversely affect
funding from the other group.

Eighth Place: $20,000 scholarship, Philip Mocz, 18, of
Mililani, Hawaii, for developing a novel statistical algorithm and using
it to discover previously unidentified patterns in the distribution of
nearby stars.

Ninth Place: $20,000 scholarship, Alexis Marie
Mychajliw, 16, of Port Washington, New York, combined her interests in
animal behavior and environmental science for a project that tracked
Odonate (dragon flies and damsel flies) family populations. She collected
data to discover the nature of population distribution and its application
to conservation policy.